Recovery Works When You Work It!

When I give spiritual talks involving recovery, people sometimes raise their hands and say “That’s great, but it doesn’t work.” I listen to their story and then I say “Let’s clarify something: Is it that it (recovery) doesn’t work, or that you didn’t work it?” Silence ensues and then the person usually says sheepishly “I didn’t work it.”

Information and awareness are great to have. They are necessary. We can’t begin to understand ourselves or our old ingrained patterns of behavior until we have awareness of how we have been hurting ourselves and others, and information about healthier patterns of behavior. But information is just information and it’s easily forgotten if we don’t put it to good use.

Recovery is a lifetime process. There’s no end to it until we breathe our last breath. It works when we work it. Working a recovery program for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, a few months or even a few years isn’t going to cut it. The moment we stop working it, we gradually relapse into old, familiar, comfortable patterns of self-destructive behavior. Before we know it, we find ourselves being misery’s best buddy once again—and then, in our denial, we blame recovery programs and say “That’s great, but it doesn’t work.”

There is no magical fix in life. No one, including our Higher Power, is going to give us a magical answer that will instantly make everything heavenly. There is no magic potion that can change us, or those we’d like to change to suit us. There is no magic mantra and there’s certainly no genie in a lamp who’s going to grant our every wish.

Face it: We have to do the hard work of making our lives good. We are the ones who have to change. We have to stop demeaning ourselves, manipulating others and swimming against the tide of a happy life.

If recovery isn’t working for you it’s because you’re not working it. And working it means more than reading and attending meetings. We can read endlessly and never take the time to do the exercises and work the program. We can attend meetings everyday and make them into pity sessions instead of working at changing our patterns of thinking and behaving. It works when you work it, and life does indeed get better. So let’s get busy!